CHICKEN — LACEY N. DUNHAM
/Morgan worked with a guy in the Marines they all called Crazy Dave who was a little apeshit. One day while out on patrol Crazy Dave found a chicken, scooped it up, clamped its beak and feet with wire, and handed it to the gunner, who tucked the frantic, squawking creature between his feet. The chicken lived at base for six months in a mesh cage behind the head until Crazy Dave was wounded and the MEDVAC carried him away. No one knew what to do with Crazy Dave’s chicken, and finally it was decided they would kill it and roast it over a spit. They were sick of MREs. They were sick of sand in their teeth and sand in their piss, too. They had the crazy idea that the chicken would cure their gripes.
They got the okay from the Master Gunny, but no one had the heart to shoot it.
“Seems wrong somehow,” one PFC said. “You can’t just point-blank shoot chickens.”
A beheading was deemed appropriate, and on the appointed day two lance corporals stretched its neck over a cinderblock and handed the axe to the new guy, fresh off basic and a little dim. He looked at each of them pleadingly and they growled back menacingly. He raised the axe and severed the head from the body in one clean blow. The chicken stumbled five yards from the cinderblock before collapsing.
“Well, fuck,” the fucking new guy said, dropping the axe to the dirt. “I didn’t know it was going to do that.”
When Morgan later told Doreen the story, his wife looked at him hard through the ticks and buzz of the computer screen, her image wavering with the poor connection as the dog nuzzled under her armpit for attention. She looked too thin, and her eyes were darker than normal. They hadn’t been in the same time zone for ten months. “Of course they do that,” she said. “What did he think would happen?”
“City boy,” Morgan explained.
Not much later, the new guy was discharged after trying to slit his bunkmate’s throat with a butter knife he had squirreled away from DFAC. It scared Morgan, not because he had watched as the new guy crept forward on his toes, arm extended, knife in his fist to press it to tender sleeping skin. Nor because it could have been his throat with the cold metal against it. It scared him to death because Morgan understood the desire for an escape by any means far better than he should.
Lacey N. Dunham's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares (online), McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Midwestern Gothic, The Other Stories, The Collagist, and Full Stop, among others. The editor of five anthologies of writing which have received recognition in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR, she is currently Fiction Editor at Necessary Fiction and directs literary education programming for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She is a first-generation college graduate originally from the Midwest and now lives in Washington, DC.
